Infrastructure

Turkey’s Ministry of Transport has made great investments to upgrade public infrastructure.
• New Airports (Istanbul’s 3rd Airport)
• New Metro lines (Istanbul, Ankara, Bursa İzmir),
• Highways (Istanbul-İzmir, 35.000 km targeted by 2023)
• Bridges (Istanbul’s 3rd Bosphorus bridge)
Between 2003 and 2011, the General Directorate for Highways constructed 15,000 kilometers of divided roads.
This brought Turkey another giant step ahead on the way to the target of building a total of 36,500 km of divided roads by 2023. In February 2012, we are at the 21,340-kilometer mark, and more projects are already under way, with ambitious time schedules.

The Transport Council has defined a number of targets for the year 2023, when Turkey will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic.
One of the most important targets is to ensure coordination between various transport modes to create a coherent, integrated transport system and to shift long distance road transport from highways to railroads. This would not only reduce transport costs and consequently the price of the transported goods, but at the same time improve the quality level of our highways by limiting the damage caused by heavy vehicles. In the event that Turkey becomes a member of the EU, it will be part of the Trans-European Networks (TEN). The State Planning Organization and the Ministry of Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications have jointly launched the so-called Transport Infrastructures Needs Assessment (TINA) and accomplished all preparations for the draft of the technical specifications

The Turkish State Railways started building high-speed rail lines in 2003. The first section of the line, between Ankara and Eskişehir, was inaugurated on March 13, 2009. It is a part of the 533 km Istanbul to Ankara high-speed rail line. A subsidiary of Turkish State Railways, Yüksek Hızlı Tren is the sole commercial operator of high speed trains in Turkey.
The construction of three separate high-speed lines from Ankara to Istanbul, Konya and Sivas, as well as taking an Ankara–Izmir line to the launch stage, form part of the Turkish Ministry of Transport’s strategic aims and targets. Turkey plans to construct a network of high-speed lines in the early part of the 21st century, targeting a 1500 km network of high-speed lines by 2013 and a 10000 km network by the year 2023.